


Caustic Echo

by ActualHurry



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Detectives, Disco Elysium - Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22534546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActualHurry/pseuds/ActualHurry
Summary: Drifter comes in contact with the burnt out ruins of the past. Lieutenant Malphur is there to pick him up.(Disco Elysium AU.)
Relationships: The Drifter/Shin Malphur
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	Caustic Echo

**Author's Note:**

> [Alcoholism & emetophobia CW]
> 
> This is loosely based off of an interaction you can get in Disco Elysium if you pick a few options that your detective’s brain doesn’t like very much! For context if you haven’t played the game, the protagonist (the detective, who doesn't remember his name...at all) has amnesia thanks to a three day bender, in which he SHOULD be investigating a murder. I thought it would be just so very neat to S/D AU it up. 
> 
> Notes:  
> \- Kimeena = a model of car (sports model...vroomvroom)  
> \- Drifter doesn't remember his name, thank you amnesia, thus being simply "Drifter"  
> \- Kim Kitsuragi is the best character ever, if you play DE then you KNOW

A fractured consciousness comes back in pieces. He hears: _open._ He hears: _drink_. There is nothing, except that there is the cold crawl of something wet and liquidy on his tongue. His slack jaw permits the whatever-it-is to slide between his lips and then into his mouth. He could not stop it if he tried. His usually very permissive throat closes on the foreign substance.

What is it? What _is_ that? Panic, bubbling up – 

He hears: _come the fuck on._

If it’s his own thoughts he’s hearing, they sure are frustrated with him. What’s the deal with that? He’s content to drift into this sea of black void until his world ends, truthfully. If it so ends the rest of the world while it’s at it, then so be it. He’s too _out_ to find the ability to care. 

He hears again: _drink._ More angry, now. 

His body seizes at the sudden, heavier gush of the silvery, smooth, life-bringing liquid – it’s water, he recognizes finally, it’s _wonderful water_ , and even while his throat works to hack it up ( _oh, for fuck’s sake_ ), the rest of his senses are already bolting upright to pay attention. He wants it. He wants _more_ of it, all of it. Has he ever tasted anything so fucking good? Why is it so damn _good?_

With awareness comes another revelation: he doesn’t really want to die. A moment ago, he’d felt really very apathetic about his own existence for somebody who doesn’t actually want to cease existing. Gold-orange light seeps in through the black. A shadow interrupts the slow burn of color. He misses it, viciously.

A weight shaped like a hand curls around his neck.

“Detective.” 

Drifter’s eyes fly open. 

Lieutenant Malphur is staring intensely at him. His hand is indeed on Drifter’s throat, but his thumb is propped under his chin and his fingers are barely touching Drifter’s skin. It’s not the threatening hold that Drifter’s agitated paranoia first assumed it was. 

Drifter’s vision swims. As soon as it clears, Shin draws his hand back, fingertips hovering a moment at the edge of Drifter’s jaw. Water dribbles down Drifter’s lips and drips from his chin. It smells like leather and lemon here in the cabin of Shin’s Kineema. Nice car. Pretty car. Drifter still wants to drive it. Shin hasn’t let him even try to touch the keys. But he’s slumped in the driver's seat, and Shin’s standing half-outside.

Outside, the sun is setting, casting a warm glow on everything. Drifter looks at the water bottle Shin’s holding.

“If you drink too much at once,” Shin says, “you’ll vomit.” 

Still, he offers the bottle out. Drifter, immune to consequences, clutches it greedily and sucks down the rest of the water.

Moments later, the empty bottle rests discarded the ground and Drifter’s there with it, on his hands and knees, heaving out the contents of his stomach. Shin waits, leaning against the Kineema. He is, either out of kindness or unhappy displeasure, not watching Drifter puke his guts out. Drifter chooses to believe it’s the latter, because the former humanizes him too damn much, and that’s just uncomfortable to think about.

“The hell happened to me,” Drifter rasps, when he’s just about done on the ground. 

“Belated alcohol poisoning? Nasty hangover catch up to you? I don’t know.”

Is that judgment in Shin’s voice? No, no, it’s…oh, he’s irritated. Right. Efficiency matters to the lieutenant. Drifter’s been anything _but_ efficient. 

“I don’t like dead bodies,” he breathes, nonsensical. 

Shin toes his boot against Drifter’s stomach, trying to urge him to sit up instead of hanging his head down low over the foul asphalt. It’s not the street’s fault he can’t hold his alcohol, Drifter thinks dazedly. He eventually sits up, then braces his hand against the car’s tire to hoist himself the rest of the way to his feet. Shin doesn’t extend a hand – wanting to preserve Drifter’s tattered dignity, or because he doesn’t want to touch the guy who splattered stomach acid on his nice, nice vehicle?

The latter, again. Better that way.

“If you needed a shot to deal with being that close to the victim’s corpse, you should have asked.” Shin pulls out a small, travel-sized bottle of liquor. Whatever shade Drifter feels himself turn must convince him to put it away. He’s smiling. “So. You wanna talk about it?” 

“Talk about what?” Drifter asks, nose wrinkling at the taste of his own mouth. 

Shin offers him another bottle of water, procured from nowhere. Drifter snatches it. This time, he paces himself. Three sips. Pause. How’s the stomach? Stomach reports back: not great. Esophagus, hold it down. Keep steady.

Shin waits for him to take another sip, and then he adds, “You mumbled something about the number nine, something about _the cosmos_ , and then you dropped like a rock. I thought you were just reading case notes, but…”

Drifter recovers enough from his initial, instinctive recoil at the recounting of his horrifying descent (but _descent_ sounds too graceful, it was more like a chaotic, sideways crumple) to come up with a response that isn’t a wordless, panicked grunt.

“I _was_ reading case notes,” Drifter mutters into the water bottle. “And then I wasn’t.” 

He’d gone from reading about case notes to reading someone else’s handwriting on the back of a receipt from some dive bar. He doesn’t remember the place, doesn’t even remember the receipt or who wrote the scrawling, pretty text – _a woman_ , says some hunch, a woman with hair like he’d never seen before and some kinda need for help – but he knows it like he knows the stars have it out for his blood and the world does, too.

Better not to say all that, though.

Shin waits on further explanation. When none comes, he nods. “It happens.” 

Drifter blinks at him.

“It’s like a thread sticking out of an old, ratty coat, right?” Shin adds. “You start fiddling with it. Then you pull a little too much. And it all comes undone in your hands. You’ve got more thread than coat by the time you realize you need to stop.”

Shin’s tarpaulin RCM cloak shifts, his arm moving beneath it, and that tiny bottle of liquor appears in the lieutenant’s hand again. He takes a carefully measured swig of it. He’s precise about his imbibement; most of the drink remains in the bottle as opposed to his mouth. 

Maybe it’s a testament of his restraint that keeps him from drinking more. Maybe it’s guilt. Or maybe it’s a show of camaraderie, to show that even the most composed and highly-respected cops in the RCM aren’t above a little indulgence when the going gets rough.

‘Little’ would be key, though. The bender Drifter found himself on was anything _but_ little. So Shin’s mocking him. That’s the only explanation.

“Something like that,” Drifter says. His response comes several beats late. His head hurts, and he presses the still-cool water bottle against his temple.

“What I’m saying is,” Shin goes on, his liquor pocketed away, “that if you’re going to lose your head over anything, losing it over the hefty, ominous weight of the cosmic realm itself is a damn good reason.” 

Drifter, at least, takes a final sip of water in quiet agreement to that.

“Anyway.” Shin’s strangely talkative, some unpleasantly attentive part of Drifter registers. “So long as we’re partners on this, I think it’s time I make it clear that I don’t like it when my partner collapses in front of me.”

Drifter finds his nerve and sneers at him. “I’ll try to keep my _collapsin’_ outside of your line of sight from now on.”

Shin glances at him, unreadable. “Will I be investigating your corpse next? How would you like your autopsy performed?” 

Faced with the reminder of his own mortality, and his bang-up job handling his own mortality, Drifter ducks his head. “I don’t like dead bodies,” he confesses again, slowly. 

It’s an empty, meaningless admission. But Shin nods once like it’s a somehow reasonable thing to say and produces Drifter’s ledger full of case notes from the roof of the Kineema. He gives them to Drifter, and then steps away far enough to slam the driver’s side door shut. The sound makes Drifter’s ears ring.

“Nobody does,” says Shin.

Like the dead bodies really are the worst part of detective work, and not the living ones.

Drifter rubs his knuckles over his eyes and takes a deep breath. The air has a chill to it. It somewhat clears his addled, pained head. “How long was I out?”

“Ten minutes. Maybe more. I carried you to the Kimeena myself.”

A question rises to Drifter’s tongue like something dreaded. Still, he asks, “So how many people have you killed, lieutenant?” 

Shin has already half-turned his back on Drifter; with those words between them, he snaps his surprised gaze back onto him, stopping where he is. “How many…why? Is that relevant?” 

“Guess not.” Drifter tongues at his teeth, bitter-sharp taste still in his mouth. “Just saw on my ledger, the kill count. You got one?”

“Yes.” The single-word reply is tight, allowing no emotion to bleed through it. “And?” 

…And _what?_ Drifter hasn’t thought far enough ahead for a follow-up. He’s surprised he’s still standing at all, let alone able to hold a conversation. Or whatever this is. It’s barely even a chat.

“— Detective.”

Then Shin’s next to him, like he was never more than a step away at all, his hand on the curve of Drifter’s shoulder. His thumb slides beneath the fold of Drifter’s collar, tucked underneath like it belongs there.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Shin says, low. “It’s on me.” 

The reminder that Shin is well aware that Drifter doesn’t have the money to be spending on anything except his nights in the hostel stings. But it feels like an offer of goodwill, not a knife in his back. 

Drifter tries again to convince himself it’s the latter. He fails.

His stomach hurts. He’s hungry, or he’s nervous, or the water’s trying to come back up again. Shin’s stare bears down on Drifter, his eyes dark, his messy fringe of hair falling across his brow. The lieutenant looks too young to be a cop, no matter how rough the definition of _cop_ is in the RCM.

“Alright,” Drifter says.

Just like always, Shin falls into step behind him, and just like always, Drifter can’t quite shake the echo of familiarity.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading <3


End file.
